Quotes about Grace

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming

The rest of this story is recorded in Jesus Calling: 365 Devotions with Real-Life Stories.

A successful day is one in which you have stayed in touch with Me, even if many things remain undone at the end of the day. Do not let your to-do list (written or mental) become an idol directing your life.

The question: What is a Christian? My answer: A Christian is someone who follows Jesus* My former answer: A Christian is someone who has accepted Jesus, and the Christian life focuses on personal practices of piety.

He's staring into the face of fellow Israelites who don't know the grace of enemy love and who want to appeal too quickly to the lex talionis or who want to become judges like God (7:1—5; cf. Jas 4:11—12). Moreover, that same audience needed to hear that forgiveness is the way kingdom living works. Those who genuinely love others forgive. Those who don't are not kingdom people.

These changes reflect the Jesus Creed: Because Jesus loves others (us), he offers himself for us to replace the lamb. Thus, the Lord's Supper is Passover morphed by the Jesus Creed. The Passover lamb becomes the Lamb of God, and the Lamb of God leaves us a rhythm by which to remember what he has done for us.

Jesus sufferes to sympathize with our sufferings.

There is something about the Sermon on the Mount that makes Christians nervous, and in particular it makes Protestants nervous, especially those whose theology's first foot is a special understanding of grace.

He experiences for us what we do not want but deserve (slavery and death), and provides for us what we do want but don't deserve (a life of freedom).

What is not out of the question is that what the world sees as a grotesque image, the cross, has become for Christians a place of grace

even Jesus was resurrected with his wounds." I like that: we, too, are raised to a vocation with the wounds of our past intact, visible, and a witness to what God can do.

when we peer into our own hearts, we will have sufficient cause — even laughably ridiculous cause — to see our own sin and be humbled before God. That will lead us to an other-awareness that our fellow disciples and humans are like us, sinners in need of mercy, grace, forgiveness, and patience. This reversal of the proclivity to be gods creates on our part a tenderness in our perception of the sins of others.